We can read about the carnage of war in A Farewell to Arms, and the power of great aspirations in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and consider what each of us can do in our times by remembering what Ernest Hemingway and so many others did in theirs.

Using rarely seen footage from the Russian State Film Archives, documentarian Kevin McNeer has produced a fascinating documentary about the late Soviet political cartoonist and propaganda artist Boris Efimov.

History is never over, what ever we think about our times of low horizons and limited ideas -- or the dread we have for the potential for our ambitious experiments to fail -- we are none of us islands.